Introduction

Dolores Prida saw and heard much to impress her in 1976 in Caracas, Venezuela, where she was reporting on an international theater festival for Visión, a Latin American newsmagazine. However, she was surprised to note that not a single one of the plays she viewed took up issues then being aired by the feminist movement. At the time, Prida was actively involved with feminism on her home turf of the United States, and she knew that the same issues preoccupying women there were also preoccupying women in Latin America and elsewhere around the world. When Prida discovered that plays addressing women's issues within Latin American contexts were scarce, she was determined to write a play that would help remedy that scarcity. Beautiful Señoritas is that play. It was staged in New York City in 1977 at the DUO Theatre.

In the essay "The Show Does Go On," published in Breaking the Boundaries, Prida's description of Beautiful Señoritas reveals its particular feminist focus. That focus is on female gender roles and stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to Latin women. Beautiful Señoritas, she says, is "a modest one-act musical play that poke[s] fun at longstanding Latin women stereotypes—from Carmen Miranda to Cuchi Cuchi Charo to suffering black-shrouded women crying and praying over their tortillas to modern-day young Latinas trying to re-define their images." Although it was published in 1991 in two acts, Prida would nevertheless call the work a one-act play owing to its brevity.

Like most of Prida's subsequent plays, Beautiful Señoritas is both comic and serious and has been staged many times. Prida is, indeed, a well-established American dramatist, and most large libraries hold volumes of at least some of her plays. Beautiful Señoritas can be found in the volume titled Beautiful Señoritas & Other Plays, published by Arte Publico Press (1991).